Video and Animation Speaks – Albeit in Softer, Gentler Terms – to This Same Urge
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THE CURATOR!AL !NCUBATOR, V.5 WHAT’S UP DOC? V!DEO AND AN!MAT!ON Jacob Korczynski Jean Paul Kelly Robin Armstrong Gabrielle Moser Brett Kashmere Introduction Video in the Age of the Re-Animator In Middle English, Anima = “life” and to animate was to instill with life, giving the act an almost god-like power. From the early days of the magic lantern shows to the noirish world of contemporary Japanese anime, the ability to make the inanimate move - animation - has a long history of popular appeal. In his classic 1922 short story Herbert West: Reanimator, H.P. Lovecraft evoked the dark attraction present in the urge to bring the dead to life, citing: “…the wonder and diabolism of his (Herbert West’s) experiments fascinated me utterly”. This year’s version of The Curatorial Incubator v.5: What’s Up Doc? Video and Animation speaks – albeit in softer, gentler terms – to this same urge. Let’s face it: animation is hot - and deadly serious. The way in which the curators in this year’s Incubator programme approached their choices speaks volumes about the current scholarship and international dialogue engendered by a consideration of animation at this point in the first decade of the 21st century. Jacob Korczynski examined the role of narrative in the development of the medium. Robin Armstrong considered the interplay between animation and gaming. Jean Paul Kelly examined how “the real” is increasingly deformed in the process of applying documentary techniques to animation. Gabrielle Moser concentrated her research into artists who physically interact with their animations. And Brett Kashmere’s interest in questions of the archive and appropriation led him to focus on “the original copy”. As part of this unique apprenticeship, Vtape provides the emerging curators with workshops – this year offered by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, co-editors of the ground-breaking anthology The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema, published by YYZ Books, Ottawa International Animation Festival and Images Festival (Toronto: 2005). Chris Gehman is an independent filmmaker, critic and curator who recently completed his MFA in film at York University. Steve Reinke is an artist, writer and videomaker, an Associate Professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University (Chicago). Reinke was awarded the Bell Canada Award for Excellence in Video Art in 2005. Finally, each of the incubatees received the benefit of editorial input on their essays. This year’s editors included Peggy Gale (independent curator), Ben Portis (curator at Art Gallery of Ontario), Janine Marchessault (artist, writer and professor at York University) and Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke. We consider that the addition of senior editors – all professionals in the field of curating and exhibiting media arts – adds an unprecedented level of skill development to the Curatorial Incubator. Lisa Steele Creative Director, Vtape Top: Jenny Perlin, Box Office. 2007. Courtesy the artist, Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin. Bottom: Jonathan Culp, Death Mask. 2004 Search and Deploy Jacob Korczynski “You have helped me, you have kept a record of what I was, you have shown me myself.” These words emerge from the dense collage of Hell (1984), exemplifying video’s historical role as a mirror held up to the actions and the image of the artist. Her tape presents the viewer with what she identifies as a modern hell, one where animation negotiates an excess of information storage and retrieval, a conception of hell that has proved remarkably prescient: twenty years later artists have continued to employ animation as a discontinuous intervention into the moving image, an interface with which to reflect upon video’s dissolution of boundaries between public and private and the ensuing fragmented status of the self. Hell’s digital effects animate a fluid image archive of both found-footage gleaned primarily from television sources, as well as documentation of performances directed and executed by Lister. The contemporary tapes of Search and Deploy (by Robert Hamilton, Andrew James Paterson and Jowita Kepa) circulate in the aftermath of the era introduced in the pioneering animation experiment of Hell, an era marked by video’s increasing malleability and its insertion into private and public realms through the introduction of the video camcorder and VCR into the home, which began to dissolve the previous boundaries between the roles of film and video. “The VCR was developed to continue television’s mission to distribute cinema into the home. Video became synonymous with home movie consumption. Portapaks evolved into camcorders, personal video instruments for recording everyday life and shaping behaviour through feedback.”1 In “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” Dan Graham makes an important distinction between the moving images of film and video. He asserts that video, with its ability to be a document of continuous duration, is able to function as a present time medium. Film, in contrast, is a medium that presents the past in a constructed form of disjunctions.2 In early video, artists (including Graham) examined the possibilities of real-time in contrast to the narrative montage of film. In its transition from film to video, animation retains the characteristics of the older medium, foregrounding a temporally mediated and process-based model. “Animation, unruliest of art forms, currently eludes description and classification boundaries, thanks to digital imagery’s blurring the distinctions between film and animation. During its century-plus history, animation — now an inescapable part of nearly every communication mode — has continually absorbed, hybridized, >mutated, and melded…”3 5 Ardele Lister, Hell. 1984 Andrew James Paterson, Damned and Forgiven. 2007 6 The tapes in Search and Deploy use animation to navigate the ambiguous intersections of private and public that video blurs. The temporal disjunctions of animation cut across distinctions between film and video, and its constructed form opens entire archives to be accessed and put into action, rendering all source material, whether found or fabricated, malleable. With the exception of video’s real-time experiments and other performative strategies, animation is essentially a two-step process, marked by the time-delay between the artist’s identification and accumulation of source material, and their activation of it. The artists in Search and Deploy explore the discontinuity of animation in order to assert multiple presences of a self and that self’s image now fragmented between private and public image realms. Starting with Lister’s use of television’s early industrial effects, the elasticity of the video’s digital image is extended by Hamilton to the still photograph, by Paterson to the personal computer, and by Kepa to the material manifestations of the tape itself. To identify and engage the multiple applications of the digital video image is to search; to order such images via animation is to deploy. The transitional conditions of the moving image and the shifting role of video in relation to film during the era of Hell are foregrounded at the outset of Lister’s tape. Following the opening sequence that features a series of hand-held shots which captures the passengers traveling in an unidentified New York City subway line, Lister exits the subterranean depths as the camera continues to accumulate its footage. The artist emerges to capture the sidewalk traffic underneath the bright lights of cinema marquees of a 42nd Street then in decline, suggesting the dominant position occupied by video from this era onward. At the midpoint of Hell Lister reveals a critical self-reflexivity in one of the work’s key sequences, foregrounding the apparatus of her image making. A man who has appeared earlier in the tape directly addressing the camera sits before an early television effects console, the kind the artist accessed through commercial broadcasters in order to animate the images of Hell. Where elsewhere Lister superimposes text upon empty frames or abstract images to provide a counterpoint to the voiceover narration that guides the viewer, here the word V-I-O-L-E-N-C-E is spelled across the frame covering the image of the man at the console. While the presence of the word at this junction in Hell anticipates the appropriated news footage that unpacks the tragic tale of a murdered family about to unfold in Lister’s collage of found footage, the viewer cannot help but consider the dominance of the text upon the image as the artist’s reflection upon animation as an active attack upon the autonomy of the image. As the anchor of Search and Deploy, Hell introduces animation as the struggle with, and between, images whose final form is far from >inevitable. 7 In contrast to a restless revision of the moving image in Hell, Robert Hamilton’s Fiets (Bicycles) (2004) foregrounds the serialized discontinuity of the discrete frame. A series of still photographs produced by the artist are assembled into a continuous visual document of time, place and memory, and accompanied by an audio montage appropriated from narrative films. Fiets (Bicycles) extends Hamilton’s earlier animation and time-lapse experiments, which include the limited range of still images generated by Nintendo Game Boy cameras and Web Cams. Primarily documenting the travel of both cyclists and pedestrians on a street during a single afternoon in Amsterdam, Hamilton maintains the graphic continuity of linear movement: the image mutates across the